Recently, I was catching up with a friend and the talk turned to some of the travel adventures I have in store for this year. I was outlining my summer trip to Europe (don’t have my tickets booked yet, but you know, whatever!), and when I finished rhapsodizing about the countries I planned to visit and the places I hoped to see, my friend asked the following question, “So, are you going with anyone?”
Why does this question annoy me?
I mean, it’s not totally unreasonable for someone to ask. Sometimes I travel alone, sometimes with others, so what I’ll be doing on any trip is never a given. Was I feeling like I needed to defend my decision to travel solo, if that’s what I was going to do? No, I wasn’t. My friend wasn’t asking about my plans in any sort of critical or judgmental way, and has never expressed the sentiment that I’m crazy to travel by myself. (In fact, no one ever has. Am I just extraordinarily lucky in that respect? Anyway, that’s probably a blog post for another day…)
So why do I find this question—which I seem to get fairly often from many people in my life—to be somewhat off-putting?
I think the answer is because it completely misses the point.
When I plan a trip, I’m almost never thinking of it in terms of being a “solo trip”, “trip with friends,” “family trip,” etc. Of course, those factors come into play in the type of experience I’m likely to have. And sometimes, who I’m going with is the point of my trip—for instance, a birthday cruise with my mom or a weekend in Portland with my best friend who lives several states away.
But generally, I don’t travel to be with people and I don’t travel to be alone. I travel to travel.
If I had to articulate why I’m going on any given trip, my answer would nearly always be, “Because Country X looks amazing and I really want to see it.” That’s it. I want to go there, so I do. Maybe alone, maybe with friends, but no matter what, if I want to see it badly enough, I make it happen.
And honestly, while this mentality is pretty common among hard-core travelers stricken with severe wanderlust, I think it’s still a bit of a foreign concept (no pun intended) to many others who don’t fall into that category. Most of my friends would never consider going on a trip alone. To them, travel is something you do if the opportunity arises and you have someone to go with, not a cherished goal that you prioritize and make a reality no matter what, whether solo or with company.
It’s almost as though having a travel companion “legitimizes” travel to many people, because that’s something they can understand. What they can’t comprehend is wanting to see a new place badly enough to be willing to do it alone. It’s the sort of thing that makes us travel junkies stand out as a bit odd. Not that I have any problem with that…but I do wonder if that’s where this question really arises from. Are people just trying to contextualize my efforts to see the world into something they can relate to and understand?
I guess that makes a certain level of sense. But I still think it’s rather unnecessary to raise the question at all.
Asking a potential traveler “are you going with anyone” just feels strange to me. Honestly, why does it matter? Will the Julian Alps be more or less memorable with someone by my side? Will the Plitvice waterfalls somehow look different? Will the curry in Brick Lane in London taste better? I don’t think so.
There are certainly advantages to both solo and accompanied travel. But generally speaking, when I take off on a journey I’m doing it for myself; to satisfy some wanderlust I desperately need to quench. Or to just pop into a new place that looks cool. But it’s about the experience itself, not who I choose to share it with. This may not be the case for everyone, but it’s almost always true for me.
So in future, when anyone asks about my travel plans, I’ll tell them yes, I’m traveling with my friend so-and-so, or no, I’m going alone this time. But I’ll also add—as I nearly always do—that I’m going no matter what.
Are there travel questions that annoy you? What are they?